Jacqueline Looney, now a vice provost and senior associate dean at the Graduate School, launched a minority recruitment effort at the school in the 1980s. Photo credit: Jon Gardiner

Durham, NC - In 1987, Danielle Carr Ramdath graduated from a small liberal arts college in Wisconsin and began graduate study in mathematics at Duke. Like most new Ph.D. students, she faced a long struggle to succeed in a challenging program in a new area where she possessed few ties.

But one other thing made her journey a little different from that of most other graduate students.

"I was the only African-American in that class for mathematics," recalled Carr Ramdath, now associate dean of the faculty at Smith College. "There weren't that many African-American students in the entire Ph.D. class. I stuck out."

That year, then Graduate School Dean Malcolm Gillis hired Jacqueline Looney as the school's first recruiter for minority students. Her hiring predated the better known Black Faculty Initiative, which came a year later, but many Duke officials say it and other diversity efforts in the Graduate School have had as important an impact as any of Duke's diversity initiatives.

"The year before I came, Malcolm Gillis had held a private ceremony for new Ph.D. students, and he was very disturbed there were so few students of color," Looney recalled in an interview this summer. In 1985, the Graduate School matriculated a total of five new black Ph.D. students.

"There were some departments such as history and English where we had some numbers, but the bottom line was there was no department that could brag about its diversity numbers. Even compared to our peers, our numbers were not what they should have been."

Gillis developed a multi-faceted strategy. Hiring Looney to specifically target black students was an important part. But he also received a $100,000 grant from The Duke Endowment to fund graduate fellowships for minority students. He received commitments from President H. Keith H. Brodie and Provost Phillip Griffiths, and then he and Looney went to each department to get the faculty on board in recruiting African-Americans.

"What Malcolm did was to make recruitment of students of color a team effort," Looney said. "He made it everyone's problem and gave everyone a role to play."

While the team didn't find a lot of resistance, it did see obstacles. Some faculty and chairs expressed concerns whether there were qualified candidates in their fields or questioned whether Duke had the resources or knowledge to find where quality minority students were.

Others expressed fears that recruiting minority students would mean they couldn't bring in other students they wanted.

Over a period of about three years, Gillis, Looney and others eased those concerns. Looney developed a road show in which Duke faculty members such as Gary Gereffi of sociology and the late Mel Lieberman of cell biology accompanied her to colleges around the country, including both peer institutions and historically black colleges and universities.

"Most of my first year was talking to Duke departments," Looney said. "I talked with them about recruiting but mostly I wanted to develop relationships and learn what faculty members were doing and what they were looking for. We got them thinking about recruiting students of color, and once we got them on board, they were our best sales people on the road."

Funding from The Duke Endowment took care of some fellowship concerns. These were add-ons, meaning the money didn't come from the department, so faculty could get both the Duke Endowment minority students and other students they were recruiting. The fellowship funding was meant to be temporary and essentially ended in 1991. By then Duke's success in recruiting minority graduate students had proved its value to departments.

Today, if departments want to recruit a minority student, they must do so with their own fellowship funds. And diversity is seen in a broader context. The Dean's Graduate Award Fellowship provides four years of support to graduate students who are U.S. citizens who through their background, heritage, socioeconomic status or life experiences add to the diversity of the university and its academic work. The Graduate School funds two years of the fellowship; the department funds the other two.

Nationally, Looney established ties with colleagues at peer institutions. They shared names, she said, and ensured that minority students were matched for the best program for them. Duke received several students that way, she said.

In addition, the Hughes, Mellon, Dana and other foundations and philanthropies worked with Duke on better preparing undergraduate students for graduate school. Not all of these undergraduate research programs targeted minority students, but by the early 1990s, Duke was getting minority applicants with stronger credentials.

"The difference was that colleges were preparing students of color for graduate school in a way they were not before," Looney said. "They came to us with research, with publications. The students were getting ready for graduate school."

The effort didn't stop once the students arrived at Duke. Looney, who left Duke for several years in the early 1990s to work at Mellon before returning, said school administrators realized early on that providing strong student services was necessary if minority students were to succeed.

In remembering her early years at Duke, Carr Ramdath emphasized the importance of those services.

"The math department provided all the Ph.D. students with programming that first year, and my adviser Mike Reed and other upper-level students supported me as well," Carr Ramdath said. "But I remember that Jackie Looney made it a point of hers to make sure all minority students across the sciences met. She invited us to her house, and we connected. I'm still in touch with many of them.

"When I got to Duke, if you had asked me what I needed in a program, I wouldn't have been able to articulate that," Carr Ramdath said. "But I was in a challenging program and I was new to the area, and I needed friends and colleagues so I wouldn't go crazy. What they did for African-American students was create a safety net."

When Looney returned to Duke to oversee service and support for all graduate students in a Graduate Student Affairs unit, she found some interesting numbers.

"We knew faculty members and others mentoring and nurturing students were essential to students of color succeeding at Duke," she said. "When we looked at graduation rates, we saw that students who got Duke Endowment fellowships finished at a higher rate than students in the general population. We started thinking that all graduate students should get the same services.

"What we did in those early days of recruiting students of color directly led to our creation of the graduate student affairs office under Dean Lew Siegel. We didn't know we were laying the groundwork at the time, but a lot of what we learned about how to develop and promote the growth of all graduate students came from those early years of minority recruiting.

"Duke may have started five years behind everyone else," Looney said, "but when we got into the game, we went in with everything."